Thursday, March 13, 2014

Text Mining Gun Deaths Data

In this post I will explore public data being collected by Slate. I previously released code using a much early set of this data demonstrating how to turn this data into an animated map.

This data began collection as a public response to the horrifying shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in December of 2012 in an attempt to create a database of all of the deaths as a result of guns in the US. Since its creation, the database has expanded to a list of over 12,000 deaths in a little over a year.

In this post I will explore a little of that database as well scrape the web for additional data from the articles listed on the database.

"http://slate-interactives-prod.elasticbeanstalk.com/gun-deaths/getCSV.php")tail(gun.deaths)summary(gun.deaths)# We can see that the vast majority of gun deaths are among men with 10,153 # and only 1,850 among women. The mean age is 33.34 while the median age is# a little lower are 30. Interestingly the maximum age is 107. What # information is not provided though would be interesting would be cause of# death such murder, suicide, accident, etc.library(XML)# Read and parse HTML file
gun.deaths.text <- list()
html.last <- ""# The following code will grab all 12k+ article text. I have a somewhat

# slow internet# This will allow you to gather some of the text and come back to it at a

# future pointif you decide not to wait for it to ping all 12k websites.for(i in(length(gun.deaths.text)+1):nrow(gun.deaths)){print(paste("reading html #", i))# The following code I borrow from a post on Quantum Forest.# It grabs the text between paragrahs from HTML documents.# www.quantumforest.com/2011/10/reading-html-pages-in-r-for-text-processing/try(doc.html <- htmlTreeParse(gun.deaths$url[i],
useInternal = TRUE))# I have added a few 'try' error handling functions so that the web scraping# loop does not stop when there is a missing URL.if(is.null(doc.html)) doc.html <- html.last
doc.text = unlist(try(xpathApply(doc.html,'//p', xmlValue)))
doc.text = gsub('\\n',' ', doc.text)
doc.text = paste(doc.text,collapse = ' ')if(identical(html.last, doc.html)) doc.text <- "ERROR Source DROPPED"
gun.deaths.text[i] <- list(doc.text)# Save the last html read as the current so that dropped documents are not

# counted twice.
html.last <- doc.html
}length(gun.deaths.text)# for the following results I only collect the first ~3000 results# I suggest saving the data after you have downloaded it all.save(gun.deaths.text,file="gun.deaths.text.Rdata")load("gun.deaths.text.Rdata")# We will use the text mining librarylibrary(tm)# We first turn our list of articles into a corpus
gun.deaths.corpus <- Corpus(VectorSource(gun.deaths.text))# Then we lowercase the words in that list.
gun.deaths.corpus <- tm_map(gun.deaths.corpus,tolower)# This will create a matrix that lists all of the words# and how frequently they appear in each article.# It can be very long.
dtm <- DocumentTermMatrix(gun.deaths.corpus)
freqTerms <- findFreqTerms(dtm,550)
dtmDic <- as.data.frame(inspect(DocumentTermMatrix(gun.deaths.corpus,list(dictionary = sort(c("suspect","suspects","gunman","fatally","slaying","witnesses","victim","victims","homicide","drug","crime","accidentally","multiple","suicide","accidental","killed","children","student","teacher","charged","arrested", "self-defense", "defend"))))))
ndict <- ncol(dtmDic)
nobs <- nrow(dtmDic)# Let's drop the information about frequency of word use and just ask whether# different words were used.
bimydf <- as.data.frame(dtmDic*0+1*(dtmDic>0))# Let's see some word frequencies plotted# First we want to count probability of word use for each article
perc <- apply(bimydf,2,mean)# I will now create my first bead plot to be saved to the hard drivepng("2013-03-13GunDeaths1.png", width = 650, height = 400)# Adjust the marginspar(mar=c(5,2,3,1))# Plot the beadsplot(perc, xaxt = "n", xlab="", ylab="%", cex=1.5,
main="Percent of Articles Using Word",pch=19)# Add guide linesfor(i in1:ndict)abline(v=i,col=gray(.9-.1*(i %% 4)), lwd=1)# Add text to identify each beadtext(cex=1, x=1:length(perc)+.5, y=-.015,names(perc),
xpd=TRUE, srt=60, pos=2)dev.off()

# This is interesting. Homicide and crime are common while accidentally

# and suicide are quite low.# Let's creating a valiable that is 1 to count how frequently a word such

#as homocide,gunman, victim, etc appears.
violent <- bimydf$homicide+bimydf$gunman+bimydf$victim+
bimydf$victims+bimydf$victims+bimydf$crime+bimydf$suspect+
bimydf$suspects+bimydf$slaying
# The average number of references to any of the above terms per article# is 2.summary(violent[doc.text != "ERROR Source DROPPED"])
violent.bi <- as.numeric(violent>0)summary(violent.bi[doc.text != "ERROR Source DROPPED"])# 58% of the articles seem to have some reference to violence or crimewith(bimydf,cor(data.frame(violent.bi,
suicide,
accidental,
accidentally,
multiple,
children,
drug)))# Looking at a correlation matrix we find more results. Our violent crime # variable is negatively correlated with suicide, accidental, and accidentally

# whilestrongly correlated with multiple, children, and drug.# Next I will plot out our data over time with each death being mapped.library("RColorBrewer")# I use color brewer to mix a brew of colors with blues representing the

3 comments:

Very interesting approach... but it unfortunately depends on a highly biased source - the news media. Anything that can be sensationalized can and will be... as this article is an example. No where in there did you look for things such as 'defend' or 'self defense' or variations on those terms... which would normally be under-reported anyway.

You have a good point there as far as what terms I used in the text search. What I did primarily was look for terms which appeared at least 500 times of which there were about 200 then I selected from that list any words that I thought would indicate the nature of the crime. I just loaded up the data and did a dictionary search for 'defend' and 'defense' and came up with only 0.8% for 'defend' and 0.5% for 'self-defense'. Thus even if we add these together (which is the maximum) these two terms appear in only 1.2% of the articles. I attempted to include other terms such as protect previously but found their prevalence so low that they were not worth showing. That said I have redrawn the plots. You can see that added those particular words makes the story more obvious. Please feel free to use other words to construct your analysis. That is the point of releasing all of the code. All you have to do is run it in R (which is free).

As for the news media being biased. That very well may be the case. However we are talking about over 3000 articles in different media outlets throughout the country written by many different writers. One would think that even if the majority of the media is biased then even for the odd reporter here and there, there would be more support of your hypothesis.

I really went into this not knowing what to expect. If you can show me how I am wrong then I would be very happy. Thanks for your comment!

I do appreciate you going to the effort to work those particular terms into the article. I still maintain that those and similar terms would likely be grossly under-reported even if there wasn't a political bias. School slayings tend to make more dramatic headlines (and sell papers, or pull traffic to blog sites) than 'intruder shot by home owner in self-defense'. No sense of moral outrage to the latter.

Unfortunately I am not sufficiently experienced with R or similar software to even begin going about trying to collating an independent body of articles, as I have a *very* hard time believing that an organization that started collecting articles with the stated intents of the original source doesn't have any sort of bias or skew to their selection.